According to reports, the leading US-based legal publisher has snapped up London-based Legal Week for an undisclosed sum.

The two publications are not strangers, as Incisive bought ALM — then known as American Lawyer Media – from Wasserstein & Co. for $630 million in 2007.

Legal Week was part of Incisive at the time, so shared a platform with ALM.

Wasserstein & Co then bought back ALM, the publisher of American Lawyer, and numerous other US legal titles, in July 2014, for $417 million.

As part of the deal, ALM will also acquire Legal Week’s related events business, which includes the annual British Legal Awards.

Since Wasserstein & Company regained ownership of ALM, the company has bought up a number of smaller publishers, such as Summit Professional Networks, an insurance-focused unit, in January 2015 for about $40 million.

ALM Media generates about $55 million in annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization and could fetch about 10 times that amount, said the sources, who requested anonymity because the matter is private.”

As well as American Lawyer, ALM produces more than 30 legal journals, magazines, newspapers, and websites, including Law.Com, Corporate Counsel, the National Law journal, the New York Law Journal, Legal Times, and the Legal Intelligencer.

ALM has had an eventful corporate history.

The American Lawyer, the founding title, was launched by Steven Brill in 1979.

In 1998, the billionaire First Boston investment banker and M&A dealmaker, Bruce Wasserstein, used a private equity vehicle to acquire The American Lawyer, which had earlier been sold by Brill to Time Warner.

Wasserstein set about enlarging the media group and added various legal titles through acquisitions, such as the National Law Journal.

American Lawyer Media formally changed its name to ALM in January 2005.

Wasserstein then secured a good price for ALM after selling to Incisive Media – a UK-based Apax portfolio company – for $630 million in July 2007.

Incisive itself, which publishes more than 100 titles, such as Legal Week, Investment Week, and the leading accountancy title, Accountancy Age, had been acquired by Apax in 2006 – a year before the ALM deal.

But having bought ALM at the top of the market, the post-crisis advertising downturn hit Incisive hard and it breached its lending covenants in 2008 as debt grew to nine times earnings.

As a result, a restructuring followed in 2009 which enabled Apax to take full control of Incisive’s US-based ALM titles and legal journals, while the UK part of the business remained in the control of its lenders, including RBS.

It was recently reported that Incisive is to undergo a further financial restructuring to work down its £100 million debt.

Sky News said that Alchemy Partners acquired a significant amount of Incisive Media’s debts in early 2014.

Elsewhere, M&A activity in the legal publishing world has been pretty high in the last few years.